Tuesday, June 29, 2010

There are many models of contemporary learning which have the student at the centre such as the CEO iLE@RN Model. Building on this, as part of my ISTE presentation on 'The Role of IWBs in a 1:1 Environment', I wanted to come up with a contemporary learning model, again with the student at the centre, but this time looking at the physical location (as opposed to the philosophical position) and the technologies that could facilitate this. To this end I came up with what I've termed the 'Aristotlean' Model of Contemporary Learning.

Taking this a step further, I wanted to emphasise that with 1-to-1, students could be learning at school, home, even dare I say it McDonalds, all the time working within the cloud via wireless:

Obviously with mobile learning this opens up so many possibilities for students to access anything, anytime, anywhere. Even with fixed devices such as IWBs in certain learning spaces i.e. school, students are still able of working within the cloud. Yet, whatever the scenario, students are always at the centre of learning, both physically and metaphorically.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Supposedly I shall be receiving an iPad to 'play' with shortly, prior to some trials in some of our schools. Am I excited? More curious (I have to support schools with Mac or PC so have no zealous affiliation either way) yet I'm excited about the possibilities in schools. However, in conversations, blogs and tweets I am hearing and reading lots of naysayers harping on about the iPad's shortfalls. Problems with school wireless, security breaches and not being able to edit in Wikispaces I'm sure will be sorted out in due course. A bigger issue for me is the problem with Flash (I'm a big user of Prezi for instance) but maybe such applications with migrate to HTML5? However, I can't buy the argument that is now almost a cliché: "its for consumption not knowledge creation". More and more we are moving to 'cloud computing'. We can create and collaborate on documents, audio edit, video edit and more all within the 'aether'. The iPad is a Cloud device. It is not a problem not having a USB port, use dropbox.com. The biggest problem, particularly in Australia, in the short-term is bandwidth. In a few years time we will look back and wonder what the fuss was about. Everything will be in the cloud and we won't need tonnes of ports. The one thing missing in all of the posturing by adults is the students' opinions. They will love using iPads and similar devices in the classroom and will find ways of achieving many of the outcomes we adults say are impossible.